Comfy & Curious
These two concepts can be great cornerstones to a yoga practice whether you are a student or a teacher.
Could they even be an extreme simplification of all you need to remember in class?
So, what do they mean and how can we use them?
It’s easy to look at the words and assume they exclude a very physical practice or only apply to a restful one but instead, let’s look through the lens of opportunity and imagine them as dials that we can be invited, encouraged, to turn up or down at will.
Comfort, comfy, comfortable is of course really the goal with yoga asana but let’s take it to also mean sustainable and comfort can mean both more comfort or less.
We can’t diminish the experience someone keen to chase depth, effort, intensity so seeing comfy as a broad spectrum leaves it beautifully open to individual interpretation.
I could be comfortable lying on the floor in apanasana, I could be within my personal comfort zone in splits, I could choose the comparable comfort of a lunge instead. Comfortable with stillness, contemplation, meditation or comfortable with deep movement, fast movement, intricate binds and balances – it’s nuanced and personal in the best possible way but more importantly it’s mine to choose not to be pushed into or out of.
How much fluidity and choice that one word can give? How it could open the playing field to more people in a group class without describing 10 different pose variations? It effortlessly crosses the bridge between the body stuff and the mind stuff of yoga.
It’s an invitation not a dictation. (Chefs kiss)
Curious, curiosity, curiously – a delicious non committal way to enquire. Curious about stillness, curious about movement, curious about doing more or indeed less, curious about investigating. Curious about treating something AND discarding it. Curious about the breath, curious about the body, curious about the mind – the concept has unlimited potential.
Curious to regard and also disregard. Curious about choices, about partaking and leaving.
It also allows us to build an objectivity to practice, to be in the seat of the observer, to be OK if it happens and OK if it dosn’t. Truely one of the deeper places of our practice to visit or to effortlessly guide others towards with this sort of vocabulary.
Both Comfy & Curious as words and concepts do not need to be explicit but rather implicit. I firmly believe the way philosophy is taught in yoga is one of the most weird and off putting experiences for many. The skill is to weave it in without a mega phone, highlighter pen or spotlight, to have people almost unaware of the big ‘philosophy’ label. Is blatantly advertising and including it for our promotion or their access point?
So now the question remains, do you see scope in this?
If you can put your individual fingerprint on these concepts of comfortable and curious and take them forward, expand on them and embrace them both as potentially the only things you have to remember.
Can they take precedence over the shapes, the themes, the sequence? Can we forget the flow and lean into the feeling?
Can these two word buddies be your cornerstones in practice or teaching as they are mine?
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